Criminalia

No one truly knows the identities of those who participated in the Boston Tea Party, but one man’s name always ends up on the usual suspects list -- and that's Dr. Joseph Warren: physician and revolutionist. And, resurrection man. Warren, along with some very well-known names, founded an illicit secret society at Harvard in the late 1700s -- the Spunker Club.

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The first attempt at snatching and ransoming Abraham Lincoln's body was in 1876. It didn’t work out, as you’ll see. But it wasn’t the only attempt at snatching Lincoln’s remains -- and, as it turns, none of them worked out. Lead by counterfeit crime boss James “Big Jim” Kennally, here's what really went down when the Kennally gang tried to snatch Lincoln and spring their man Benjamin Boyd from prison.

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The stories of both Chris Baker and Grandison Harris take place during the American Civil War and period of Reconstruction. Both were body snatchers, or night doctors as they were known in the south, and each worked exclusively for a medical school -- and both men were enslaved.

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Resurrectionist William Cunningham was actively stealing bodies from grave sites around Cincinnati from 1855 to 1871. He was well known, and he was something of a legend. He once returned to the same gravesite at which he had earlier been caught digging – after he’d bought those who had detained him a drink. He dressed the bodies he stole. And, he had a “villainous bald head.”

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Snatching bodies from graves to sell them to medical and anatomy schools was once a super-common reason for disinterring corpses, but it’s definitely not the only reason people have disturbed the dead. And as strange as this may sound, it turns out many people have had their skull stolen from their grave -- sometimes for research, sometimes for ransom, and sometimes, because they were considered prized possessions.

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So far in our season of body snatching, we’ve been looking at things mainly from the point of view of the snatcher. But we’re going to change that up a little. Scottish surgeon John Hunter was “the patron saint of the body snatchers.” What do you have to do to earn that title? Well. Let’s find out.

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Contrary to popular belief, the famous body-snatching duo of William Burke and William Hare were not actually body snatchers. They never robbed graves at all -- they had their own way of supplying anatomists with fresh corpses, and it didn’t involve the graveyard. They simply killed people. And a new word was coined from the pair’s murderous practices: ‘burking'.

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He was hardly the only professional body snatcher in Washington, D.C. in the late 19th century, but William M. Jansen is definitely one of the most colorful. He snatched the body of Charles Shaw, and sold it. And then he stole it a second time. And it all happened within 36 hours of Shaw’s death. Here's how it went down.

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Welcome to first episode of a new season of Criminalia. This season we're talking about body snatchers, and the bodies they snatched. Ben Crouch was the son of a carpenter, and was a well-known prizefighter in his day. He’s described as a tall, flamboyantly-dressed man with a pox-marked face who loved to wear gold jewelry, especially gold rings. He could be violent and intimidating -- and he was the leader of London's most notorious group of body snatchers in the 1810s.

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In season 6 of Criminalia, you can expect to hear about those who dug up the dead for cash. Grave robbers dug up graves to steal valuable items that had been buried with the deceased. As did tomb raiders. They were known to take everything but the body. Body snatchers and resurrectionists, though, stole bodies from graves. The first recorded case of body snatching is attributed to four medical students in Bologna, Italy, in 1319 -- and we'll start there, to find out why.

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